Remove all features


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Lair Larrikin

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:34

Remove all features

There are way too many options, and way too much content. The entirety of the DC:SS vaults, races, classes, and features just add tedium to the game. They are just filler, and add no positive or interesting choices for the player. As a new player I felt completely overwhelmed.

I'll start from the beginning:

The "choose player name" feature is a ridiculous waste of coding, My "name" didn't affect gameplay at all! I realized this after a few games, and it made me FURIOUS! I spent at least 5-10 minutes each game just on deciding my name! Either rework player names, or remove them entirely. It's just an artificial choice that does nothing interesting.

Next, I get to choose my race, and class. One word: "why?" I thought choosing my name was tedious and boring, but now I have hundreds of combinations to choose from. this is VERY overwhelming for someone who's just starting out, and honestly there are many choices that could be merged or removed. I would personally be in favor of just one universal player character. streamlining the game this way makes the game easier for new players, and removes artificial differences between "races." for example: ogre takes slightly faster to train M&F while it takes him slightly longer to raise armour. It's not important in the end because all races end up as killing machines anyway. :roll:

This leads me to my next point. the m screen, AKA, your skills. upon my first visit to this screen. I had to study it for at least 10 literal real world minutes. I was sweating, wondering about how I should allocate my experience. In the end I decided that I would leave the default spread on, because I figured it was optimal. Nothing in the game indicated otherwise. Upon reading more about optimal play online, I soon discovered that the exact OPPOSITE was true! Why would the game set me up with a sub-optimal experience spread while giving me no indication of the fact that I'm playing wrong! This is straight up trickery. Either player experience needs to level itself up in an optimal way automatically, or it should straight up be removed. My second issue with the m screen is that most choices are artificial, and exist solely to confuse the player. There are several different weapon skills for example. If I start off with a sword, but then I find a very cool axe, I have to raise a new skill or miss out. This is simply no fun. Also, why is there a FIGHTING skill on top of all the weapon skill choices? I later found out that fighting raises your hitpoints, but there was no actual indication of this at all. Remove fighting, or rework it into "vitality." Now take everything I just said about weapon skills and fighting, and apply it to magic schools and spellcasting. This whole system is just ridiculously tedious and hell to work around. It's very confusing.

After getting past the hurdles of "name" "race" "class" and "skills" I get to actually start playing the game. To my displeasure, each floor is a goddamn labyrinth, and the manner in which I explore them makes no difference in the end. the procedurally generated floors are ironically a good indicator of what I mean by this. You can arrange these maps in billions of different ways, but ultimately the experience is still the same for every. single. floor. "Exploraton" and the procedural generation just makes the experience very boring and pointless. The same can be said about the myriad of different enemies in the game. They all attack the same way (within their respective "type" eg, wizard/warrior/boring filler etc), either merge and rework monsters, or remove them completely.

This entire game is a mess of tedium and boringness. I beg the devs to please remove as many pointless, and stupid features they can.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:41

Re: Remove all features

removing name/species/background sounds pretty good to me

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:46

Re: Remove all features

If it is a joke, it should be posted in CYC subforum.
If it is not a joke, your analysis is incorrect, hopefully because you have too little experience with the game. For example, if automatic skilling was optimal, the m screen would not exist because no one would switch to manual skilling. Try Felid Berserker if you want to see a combo which is never a killing machine etc.
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Blades Runner

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:48

Re: Remove all features

Maybe if you remove some features, the fewer resulting options and interactions will make other features less confusing. [thinking face emoji]
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:52

Re: Remove all features

Did the devs remove your sense of humor or something

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:56

Re: Remove all features

Why was this moved out of GDD?

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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 03:57

Re: Remove all features

be careful that onget doesn't see this; he'll try to stupid remove you!
take it easy

Dungeon Master

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 04:46

Re: Remove all features

fun trivia: as of about a year ago, you don't actually have to choose a name

(in offline play)
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 05:06

Re: Remove all features

PleasingFungus wrote:fun trivia: as of about a year ago, you don't actually have to choose a name

(in offline play)


funner fact: i'm the one who suggested that change
take it easy

Blades Runner

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 05:48

Re: Remove all features

FR: remove removal.

Remove fighting, or rework it into "vitality."

I think there's an obvious compromise here: call it
'Fightality'.


Random name is neat -- I now have "Hohaymak" the VSMo. IMO the 'no naming for online play, just the fixed nickname' is a minor issue. It would be nice if online had an additional value representing nickname, so that the data for a given player can still be collated easily and the one-save-limit enforced*, but allowing some personalization (or randomization) of the character name.

* eg. the savegame is named using the nickname only, the morgue is named using the nickname and character name, and the name shown on screen is the character name (with the nickname shown elsewhere IFF you are spectating someone.)

Shoals Surfer

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 06:38

Re: Remove all features

Make the game play itself, it's too much of a bother to do it myself. Enhance the scripts by sacrificing a nerd to makhleb, so the glorious one may possess the game.

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Sar

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 07:17

Re: Remove all features

I wish people would stop use "procedural generation" as a synonym for "random generation".

Edit: though I guess Crawl level gen is not completely random so it's a mix of both, really.

Blades Runner

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 10:20

Re: Remove all features

Crawl and other roguelikes are very much based on procedural generation (and frequently very far from "completely random").
The RNG itself is a procedural generator (you put a given seed in, you get out a fixed sequence of numbers corresponding to that seed, used to structure the game).

Even taking that into account though, I agree OP has managed to use "procedural generation" wrong.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 12:49

Re: Remove all features

Random names are bad for offline play. When I win character I want to see filename like morgue-DEMo-20160611-092907.txt instead of morgue-Vertysko-20160611-092907.txt

Mines Malingerer

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 15:09

Re: Remove all features

TonberryJam wrote:Make the game play itself, it's too much of a bother to do it myself. Enhance the scripts by sacrificing a nerd to makhleb, so the glorious one may possess the game.


Search for a free js browser game called 'clickpocalypse 2'.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 18:05

Re: Remove all features

Sandman25 wrote:Random names are bad for offline play. When I win character I want to see filename like morgue-DEMo-20160611-092907.txt instead of morgue-Vertysko-20160611-092907.txt


this sounds like a problem with how crawl saves morgues, not with random names
take it easy

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 18:26

Re: Remove all features

Arrhythmia wrote:this sounds like a problem with how crawl saves morgues, not with random names


It is a problem with names also. Currently I have 2 games in progress, they are called FoCj (suspended for several months already) and VpEn and they are self-evident. It would be nice if there existed an option in init.txt to have such names generated by default.

Edit. Auto-renaming characters to SpEn-wizmode after activating wizard mode would be nice to.

Dungeon Master

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 22:34

Re: Remove all features

that is insanely soulless, wow

the great hero FoCj has conquered the dungeon and retrieved the Orb of Zot. huzzah

i mean i get where you're coming from but going from there to "random names are bad for offline play" seems like it really misunderstands what counts as "fun" for most people

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 22:54

Re: Remove all features

PleasingFungus wrote:that is insanely soulless, wow

the great hero FoCj has conquered the dungeon and retrieved the Orb of Zot. huzzah

i mean i get where you're coming from but going from there to "random names are bad for offline play" seems like it really misunderstands what counts as "fun" for most people


Good that you replied. Can a patch to use names like that be accepted? By default nothing will change of course.

Edit. Seriously, I have a folder where I keep morgues of my won characters. Without that folder and naming convention I would accidentally try to win a character I have already won which is stupid provided how many combos are in crawl.
Last edited by Sandman25 on Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 23:00, edited 2 times in total.
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Halls Hopper

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Post Thursday, 23rd June 2016, 22:58

Re: Remove all features

It would be way better for file names to be more usefully-named, than to remove character names from the game.

I very much enjoy "Wham! the TrAM" thank you very much.
remove handsome distillation

Dungeon Master

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 02:19

Re: Remove all features

that seems like an option that would be useful to a group consisting of one person (you)

if you're playing offline anyway, why not just patch it yourself?

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Blades Runner

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 02:37

Re: Remove all features

Unless you win games really, really quickly, I don't see why you wouldn't just update the filename using your file browser's rename function, when you win the character.
Writing any code at all seems excessive.

(but if you're stuck on it, it's also possible to write a script that examines the description given in the "Began as a .." line of each morgue in your 'won' directory, turns this into a standard 4 character code like "MiFi", and prepends it to the filename (if it isn't already present))

[curiously, there is are no occurrences of the abbreviated species+background code for your character in a standard morgue, AFAICS]

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 03:38

Re: Remove all features

I don't need to write a script, it's easier for me to name characters properly when I start new game. Sorry, I had to try :)

Snake Sneak

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 07:19

Re: Remove all features

In my opinion, reducing Orc to two levels or Lair to six has done nothing to make the game better. You have less chance to see some of the unique level designs and vaults.
I don't find 8 levels of Lair "boring" or repetitive, it is just one facet of the whole game (i.e. Lair is the green DC, Abyss the purple, Orc the brown and Vault the silver).
It seems to me these changes are nothing but an effort to put in more difficulty that has been removed elsewhere in the game. The worst offender I think is the removal of drowning. So you drowned your 21st level character, maybe quaff an extra flight potion if you have already made it that far into the game or quaff a curing potion if you are confused and next to deep water.

Sar

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 07:43

Re: Remove all features

Removal of some of Orc and Lair levels actually increased content density. Yes, you have less chance to see vaults - just play more Crawl!

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Snake Sneak

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 07:48

Re: Remove all features

But what constitutes good content density? I think Lair has gotten much, much harder for already difficult builds such as OP.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 08:07

Re: Remove all features

It's probably individual? I'm just pointing out that removal two out of 4 very similar levels (well, it's more like 2 out of 3 since Orc:4 is notably different from Orc 1-3) increases the density of the unique content.

And yes, it makes Crawl harder, but the common agreement is that Crawl is too easy. Well, at least here.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 08:17

Re: Remove all features

Whether or not Crawl is too easy, Lair and Orc were both too long for what they were/are.

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Tomb Titivator

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 08:49

Re: Remove all features

to be fair, how or why would you expect your name to affect gameplay?
swoonis wrote:This leads me to my next point. the m screen, AKA, your skills. upon my first visit to this screen. I had to study it for at least 10 literal real world minutes.

swoonis wrote:I later found out that fighting raises your hitpoints, but there was no actual indication of this at all.

how do you study this screen for more than a minute without pressing "?" and, for example, "a", which would show
  Code:
Fighting

Fighting skill increases your accuracy and damage in hand-to-hand combat, and
also increases your maximum health.

? The game comes with a manual at the click of a button, and the game reminds you about it every single time you make a new char or load a game!

Blades Runner

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 08:58

Re: Remove all features

I actually thought that was the only good point from op. Given that people mainly train fighting for HP AFAICS, Fighting is simply a bad name for the skill.
(arguably Spellcasting has the same problem -- spell levels rather than casting competency is its most salient feature in practice)

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 09:32

Re: Remove all features

Wait a minute, guys. Does anyone really think that the OP was not a joke? "Remove all features"? Seriously?

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Blades Runner

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 10:24

Re: Remove all features

The topic name is clearly a joke. The rest, OTOH, who knows?
There is no whining that is so whiny that nobody will seriously do it.

My 'fightality' suggestion was also clearly a joke but it was meant seriously too (as in, it's a really silly name but might still be an improvement on what we have)

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 12:48

Re: Remove all features

Magipi wrote:Wait a minute, guys. Does anyone really think that the OP was not a joke? "Remove all features"? Seriously?


How can you be sure?

Spoiler: show
Albert Einstein wrote:Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
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Blades Runner

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 14:59

Re: Remove all features

Magipi wrote:Wait a minute, guys. Does anyone really think that the OP was not a joke? "Remove all features"? Seriously?


I mean, with some of the suggestions I see thrown around I wouldn't be too surprised if there are people here who took this seriously.

savageorange wrote:(arguably Spellcasting has the same problem -- spell levels rather than casting competency is its most salient feature in practice)


I think spellcasting is fine because it actually does affect everything, it improves spell success, spell power, hunger cost, increases the amount of spell slots you have and also increases the amount of magic you have to spend on said spells. Yeah, you don't train spellcasting for increases in spellpower or success, but it still does offer minor improvements across the board to everything involved with casting spells.

Slime Squisher

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Post Friday, 24th June 2016, 20:42

Re: Remove all features

Sar wrote:I wish people would stop use "procedural generation" as a synonym for "random generation".

Edit: though I guess Crawl level gen is not completely random so it's a mix of both, really.


Random level generation is what happens in Angband when you use a scroll of destruction and the area around you becomes a randomized pile of rubble:

Image

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Blades Runner

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Post Saturday, 25th June 2016, 01:03

Re: Remove all features

^ Yep, that is random, and it's also procedural.

Laraso wrote:
savageorange wrote:(arguably Spellcasting has the same problem -- spell levels rather than casting competency is its most salient feature in practice)


I think spellcasting is fine because it actually does affect everything, it improves spell success, spell power, hunger cost, increases the amount of spell slots you have and also increases the amount of magic you have to spend on said spells. Yeah, you don't train spellcasting for increases in spellpower or success, but it still does offer minor improvements across the board to everything involved with casting spells.


Spellcasting does affect everything, but how common is it for a newbie to overtrain it in an attempt to improve success rate, when they really should be training specific school(s)? How newbies respond to a name is what we have to look at to determine whether the name is good or bad. Currently, we rely on them looking at both the Spellcasting description: 'slightly increases the success rate and spell power' , and the specific school: 'increases the success rate and spell power', and connecting them. Or reading about what is important on the forums (this is my case; I don't think I have ever read the spell-school descriptions until just now).

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